Sam Bankman-Fried is going to jail

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Sam Bankman-Fried is going to jail     A federal judge in New York today ordered disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried's to jail after revoking his bail, The New York Times reported. Continued here

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The Seven Social-Media Commandments     Like any other technology, whether nuclear power or the printing press, social media is only as good as the people who use it—and over the past decade, we haven’t exactly used it well. What began as a promising prospect for connecting communities and amplifying new voices has gradually evolved into an engine for sowing upset, distrust, and conspiracy. As the next generation of social-media sites emerges, one question is: Can we do better?I think so. Rather than holding out for unlikely top-down solutions from Washington or Silicon Valley, users can solve our problems from the bottom up. As individuals, we can’t necessarily make better social-media platforms, but we can make better choices on them. So whether you’re joining a new site like Threads or trying to get more out of an old haunt like Facebook, here are some tips for how to use social media without it using you. Continued here

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Everything is coming together for launch of NASA's mission to a metal asteroid     TITUSVILLE, Florida—NASA's Psyche spacecraft is running a year behind schedule before the beginning of its journey to explore a metal asteroid, but mission managers said Friday the probe is essentially ready for launch in less than two months. Continued here

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Is Trump Daring a Judge to Jail Him?     When Donald Trump appeared last week in a Washington, D.C., courtroom for his arraignment on federal election charges, the presiding judge gave the former president a few simple instructions for staying out of jail while he awaited trial.Trump could not talk to potential witnesses about the case except through lawyers, Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya told him, and he could not commit a crime on the local, state, or federal level. Both are standard directives to defendants. But then Upadhyaya added a warning that seemed tailored a bit more specifically to the blustery politician standing before her: “I want to remind you,” the judge said, “it is a crime to intimidate a witness or retaliate against anyone for providing information about your case to the prosecution, or otherwise obstruct justice.” Continued here

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How do you rationalize your unethical behaviors?     What would you be willing to do if you thought you’d get away with it? Kelly Richmond Pope, a forensic accountant, delves into how we often unintentionally ignore our moral compasses and veer into unethical behavior when possible consequences are intangible. Kelly says we do this mainly by convincing ourselves that everyone else behaves similarly. But is that true? She shares the results of an ethics survey she uses in her class, where her students found themselves divided about whether a social lunch with a colleague, discussing personal and work matters, should be expensed as a work-related activity. She also shares her experience of accidentally receiving an extra handbag and how different people advised her to proceed. Continued here

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No regrets: Gender-affirming chest surgery in adults has long-term satisfaction     People who underwent gender-affirming chest reconstruction surgeries as adults have virtually no regrets years later and overwhelmingly high levels of satisfaction with their decision to have the procedure, according to a study published Wednesday in JAMA Surgery. Continued here

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The Role of Taboos in a Liberal Democracy     Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.How should liberal democracies utilize or eschew taboos? (See any and all items below for context, and feel free to construe the question broadly or to focus on anything related to it.) Continued here

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Microsoft finds vulnerabilities it says could be used to shut down power plants     On Friday, Microsoft disclosed 15 high-severity vulnerabilities in a widely used collection of tools used to program operational devices inside industrial facilities such as plants for power generation, factory automation, energy automation, and process automation. The company warned that while exploiting the code-execution and denial-of-service vulnerabilities was difficult, it enabled threat actors to “inflict great damage on targets." Continued here

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Photos of the Week:     Mountain-bike racing in Scotland, flooding in Northern Europe, missile strikes in Ukraine, wildfire damage in Hawaii, a rescued wallaby in Australia, a dog-surfing championship in California, a rubber-duck derby in Chicago, and much more This underwater picture shows Brazilian surfer Gabriel Medina during a training session on August 9, 2023, in Teahupo'o, Tahiti, a few days before the WSL Shiseido Tahiti pro-surfing event. # Continued here

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Is Ben Wikler the Most Important Democrat in America?     The Wisconsin chair has turned around his party’s fortunes. But his winning formula faces a stern test in 2024.The man who has been hailed as “the best state chair in the country” is not a national household name. He’s not even a household name in his own state. But on a recent afternoon in the small village of Grafton, Wisconsin, Ben Wikler might as well have been Bono. Continued here

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Five philosophers on the philosophy of sex     Philosophy spends a lot of time on extremely dry topics. Asking if chairs have consciousness might be titillating for those in the field but dull (and pointless) for most everyone else. However, philosophy is indeed concerned with the entirety of human experience, and that includes sex. While not every major philosopher spent time on the subject — Aristotle, for example, generally ignored it — these five thinkers asked some big questions about it. Plato was a Greek philosopher who studied under Socrates and taught Aristotle. His works are among the most important in the history of Western philosophy. Continued here

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Zoom updates terms of service to clarify that it won't use your calls to train AI     Earlier this week, videoconferencing company Zoom made headlines for a recent terms of service update that implied that its customers' video calls could be used to train AI models. Those terms said that "service generated data" and "customer content" could be used "for the purpose of product and service development," such as "machine learning or artificial intelligence (including for the purposes of training or tuning of algorithms and models." Continued here

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California gives Waymo and Cruise the go-ahead to charge passengers     The robotaxi companies Waymo and Cruise now have permission to offer around-the-clock driverless rides to fee-paying passengers in San Fransisco. Until now, both autonomous ride-hailing companies have been able to offer restricted service in the city, but on Thursday afternoon the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approved a pair of resolutions that remove those restrictions. Continued here

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Illinois just made it possible to sue people for doxxing attacks     Last Friday, Illinois became one of the few states to pass an anti-doxxing law, making it possible for victims to sue attackers who "intentionally" publish their personally identifiable information with intent to harm or harass them. (Doxxing is sometimes spelled "doxing.") Continued here

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A Quieter, Gentler Music Festival     This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Music festivals, I thought, were for hot people who like electronic dance music and pulling all-nighters. They’re for rolling on cool new recreational drugs with strange names. They’re for wearing bras as shirts. Continued here

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Musk dumps remaining Twitter-branded stuff in auction     Elon Musk is having another garage sale, this time dumping all of the leftover junk around X headquarters that belongs to the former Twitter brand. Continued here

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The organoid revolution: From a breast in Jello to a synthetic embryo     For over a century, scientists have dreamed of growing human organs sans humans. This technology could put an end to the scarcity of organs for transplants. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The capability to grow fully functional organs would revolutionize research. For example, scientists could observe mysterious biological processes, such as how human cells and organs develop a disease and respond (or fail to respond) to medication without involving human subjects. Recently, a team of researchers from the University of Cambridge has laid the foundations not just for growing functional organs but functional synthetic embryos capable of developing a beating heart, gut, and brain. Their report was published in Nature. Continued here

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The New Old Dating Trend     Growing up in Maryland, Radha Patel didn’t see anyone in her area using a matchmaker. But she was aware that in India, where her parents had emigrated from, plenty of couples were fixed up—by relatives, respected elders, women in the community trusted to intuit good pairs. For some reason, the idea of it stuck in the back of her mind. It was still lingering there in 2018, when friends, frustrated with dating apps, started asking for help finding love. “I’m not a tech person,” she thought. “What can I do?” Then she realized that she could play matchmaker.She started setting people up, and that turned into a hobby, which later that year became a business, Single to Shaadi. She and many of the matchmakers she knows saw a wave of new clients in 2020, when the popular Netflix show Indian Matchmaking, which follows a professional cupid from Mumbai, came out. The coronavirus pandemic might have contributed to the surge; especially early on, plenty of people didn’t want to go on more in-person dates than absolutely necessary. And perhaps they also realized that their time was too precious to waste by swiping fruitlessly on dating apps. According to Patel, Single to Shaadi doubled its number of active clients from 2019 to 2020, and again the next year. Continued here

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A Novel Doesn't Have to Be About an Individual     This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Our lives are shaped by networks: of family, friends, and colleagues, or the wider ones that encompass neighbors and fellow citizens. We exist in relation to others. And yet novels, beginning almost as soon as Don Quixote set out on his quest, have long fixated on the individual as a shaper of his or her fate, as the fundamental unit for a story. The individual acts or is acted upon, and narrative results from this tension. Which is why James McBride’s most recent two novels are so radical and satisfying. They are, at their foundation, about networks. The unit he’s interested in is community. Continued here

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The Devil Inside Her     A newly published book by the novelist Susan Taubes further reveals her struggle to make herself whole.The American novelist Susan Taubes drowned herself off the coast of East Hampton in 1969 at the age of 41. She had suffered from severe depression for a long time, but many friends thought the proximate cause of her death was a savage New York Times review of Divorcing, the only one of her novels to be published in her lifetime. The review had come out just a few days earlier. The critic, Hugh Kenner, had dismissed the work as the pretentious noodlings of a “lady novelist.” Kenner was cruelly, unforgivably wrong. Divorcing—reissued in 2020 by NYRB Classics, this time to high praise—is a masterpiece: witty, raw, and outrageous. More than half a century and a feminist revolution later, it still feels utterly original, and is still shocking. That readers now are likely to come to the novel knowing, either from reviews or the preface, that most of it is autobiographical makes the shock even more acute. Continued here

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Before a Bot Steals Your Job, It Will Steal Your Name     In May, Tessa went rogue. The National Eating Disorder Association’s chatbot had recently replaced a phone hotline and the handful of staffers who ran it. But although it was designed to deliver a set of approved responses to people who might be at risk of an eating disorder, Tessa instead recommended that they lose weight. “Every single thing that Tessa suggested were things that led to the development of my eating disorder,” one woman who reviewed the chatbot wrote on Instagram. Tessa was quickly canned. “It was not our intention to suggest that Tessa could provide the same type of human connection that the Helpline offered,” the nonprofit’s CEO, Liz Thompson, told NPR. Perhaps the organization didn’t want to suggest a human connection, but why else give the bot that name?The new generation of chatbots can not only converse in unnervingly humanlike ways; in many cases, they have human names too. In addition to Tessa, there are bots named Ernie (from the Chinese company Baidu), Claude (a ChatGPT rival from the AI start-up Anthropic), and Jasper (a popular AI writing assistant for brands). Many of the most advanced chatbots— ChatGPT, Bard, HuggingChat—stick to clunky or abstract identities, but there are now many new additions to the already endless customer-service bots with real names (Maya, Bo, Dom). Continued here

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GitHub's Hardcore Plan to Roll Out Mandatory Two-Factor     You've heard the advice for years: Turn on two-factor authentication everywhere it's offered. It's long been clear that using only a username and password to secure digital accounts isn't enough. But layering on an additional authentication "factor"—like a randomly generated code or a physical token—makes the keys to your kingdom much tougher to guess or steal. And the stakes are high for both individuals and institutions trying to protect their valuable and sensitive networks and data from targeted hacking or opportunist criminals.Even with all its benefits, though, it often takes a little tough love to get people to actually turn on two-factor authentication, often known as 2FA. At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas yesterday, John Swanson, director of security strategy at GitHub, presented findings from the dominant software development platform's two-year effort to research, plan, and then start rolling out mandatory two-factor for all accounts. And the effort has taken on ever-increasing urgency as software supply chain attacks proliferate and threats to the software development ecosystem grow. Continued here

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Sites scramble to block ChatGPT web crawler after instructions emerge     Without announcement, OpenAI recently added details about its web crawler, GPTBot, to its online documentation site. GPTBot is the name of the user agent that the company uses to retrieve webpages to train the AI models behind ChatGPT, such as GPT-4. Earlier this week, some sites quickly announced their intention to block GPTBot's access to their content. Continued here

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"5 stages of grief" is a myth -- and knowing that helps us better cope with loss     Grief is a particular kind of trauma and its effects can be profound, disruptive, and bewildering. Among all the psychological symptoms of grief — which can include amnesia and a kind of “stepping outside of oneself” or dissociation — the loss of personal identity appears to be the most complicated. Most people define themselves to some degree through their relationships (father, mother, husband, wife), and the loss of the relational person, particularly a spouse or a child, precipitates a profound sense of confusion and loss of one’s sense of selfhood.The process of reconstructing one’s self without the loved person is confounding. The memories, vocabulary, and life one built with the other are no more and thus, the linear sense of oneself, of one’s life narrative, is disrupted. Suddenly you’re the only person who remembers your history and your life. Many bereaved people describe the loss of a spouse as an amputation, and in a psychological sense, it is.  Continued here

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Anti-magnetizing-vaccine doctor loses medical license     Sherri Tenpenny, the Ohio anti-vaccine doctor who made national headlines for claiming in viral testimony that COVID-19 vaccines make people magnetic, has lost her medical license. Continued here

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Edvard Munch Lightens Up     Edvard Munch, 1863–1944, was a zeitgeist conductor. Like Dostoyevsky before him, like Kafka after him, he was one of those somewhat hastily assembled humans—the skull plates not stapled down, the nerve endings dangling—who get chosen by the daemon of history to bear its message into the world.Poor bastard. “You paint like a pig, Edvard!” yelled a young realist named Gustav Wentzel, getting in Munch’s face at an 1886 exhibition in Kristiania (now Oslo) that featured his painting The Sick Child. “Shame on you.” Munch, at the time, was penniless. His best friends were nihilists. Also alchemists, sadists, diabolists, absinthe fiends, and the occasional haunted dramatist. Ibsen came to his 1895 exhibition, the one that sparked a public debate about Munch’s sanity, and growlingly counseled him: “It will be with you as it was with me. The more enemies you have, the more friends you will have.” Strindberg, very mad, was a fellow paranoiac: “As regards Munch, who is now my enemy,” he wrote to his editor, “I am certain he will not miss the opportunity to stab me with a poisoned knife.” Years later, when Munch was painting on the beach and a gust of wind upended his easel, he blamed Strindberg. Continued here

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200-Million-Year-Old Poop Reveals Parasites That Infected a Crocodile-Like Reptile     The prehistoric fossil could help researchers understand the relationships between parasites and host organisms in the Late TriassicScientists have sliced open 200-million-year-old, fossilized poop—likely from a creature that resembled a crocodile—and discovered the animal had been infected with prehistoric parasites. Continued here

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The Best Laptop Stands to Save Your Achin' Neck     If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDStill balancing your laptop on a stack of old books? It's time to upgrade. Having the right laptop stand can make life more comfortable, so you can stop craning your neck while you work. Continued here

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The Best Back-to-School Deals on Laptops, Backpacks, and Earbuds     Summer is Fading away, and school will soon be back in session. We scoured the internet for the best discounts on gadgets and gear for teachers, students, parents, and anyone else in the market for back-to-school fare. Be sure to check out our Best Dorm Gear guide for additional recommendations and gift ideas, plus the Best Student Discounts and Best Teacher Discounts. Updated August 10: We've crossed out deals and added new discounts on laptops, tablets, and other gear. Continued here

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Five Ways of Looking at Harriet Tubman     The road to the new Harriet Tubman statue in Philadelphia, the city she fled to upon her escape from slavery in 1849, has been a long one.In early 2022, in honor of Tubman’s 200th birthday, Philadelphia unveiled a temporary statue at City Hall: Harriet Tubman: The Journey to Freedom by artist Wesley Wofford. Soon after, the city announced it would commission Wofford to create a new permanent statue. Continued here